Annotated Faces in the Wild

Annotated Faces in the Wild (AFW) is a dataset of photos used for face recognition. The dataset was published in 2012 and contains 205 total images. Exposing.ai located 182 original photos from Flickr used to build AFW. The dataset has been used in at least 118 projects spanning 21 countries, including 15 projects that may have commercial applications, and 1 project that may have defense applications.

In 2013 AFW appeared in a research paper from Megvii (Face++), who is currently blacklisted in the United States. 2 AFW also appears in several experiments with researchers affiliated with Microsoft, even though most of the images were either copyright or used a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license.

Information Supply Chain

To help understand how Annotated Faces in The Wild has been used around the world by commercial, military, and academic organizations; existing publicly available research citing Annotated Faces in the Wild was collected, verified, and geocoded to show how AI training data has proliferated around the world. Click on the markers to reveal research projects at that location.

AFW Copyright Distribution

AFW Creative Commons License Distribution

AFW Image Upload Year Distribution

Top 10 AFW Image #Tags

Top 10 Geocoded Cities AFW

Citing This Work

If you reference or use any data from the Exposing.ai project, cite our original research as follows:

@online{Exposing.ai,
  author = {Harvey, Adam. LaPlace, Jules.},
  title = {Exposing.ai},
  year = 2021,
  url = {https://exposing.ai},
  urldate = {2021-01-01}
}

If you reference or use any data from AFW cite the author's work:

@article{Zhu2012FaceDP,
    author = "Zhu, Xiangxin and Ramanan, Deva",
    title = "Face detection, pose estimation, and landmark localization in the wild",
    journal = "2012 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition",
    year = "2012",
    pages = "2879-2886"
}

References